This is a video of a short collage film from 2000 called "Found Film" that was based on several rolls of camera tests shot by Tony Allegro that he was discarding.
Found Film was assembled directly on film, then transfered to video, and loop-printed and color corrected.
Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 326pp. Pb. ISBN 0-8166-3414-9
This review argues that Hawkins contributes an important argument to contemporary debates on the subversiveness of "art-horror" in destabilising common assumptions of taste and the aesthetic strategies of underground movies generally.
Any technology dependent art is subject to two kinds of technological failure. The first is familiar and obvious: those glitches, stoppages, etc. that happen when our technology fails to work properly; the second comes in the form of obsolesence, the failure of technology due to its having been replaces, revised, updated or otherwise pushed out-of-use. The greatest problem for all tech-dependent art is what happens when the second of these has come to pass and it is no longer possible to view the art because the tech it depends upon no longer exists? We are already seeing the early stages of this with art that relies upon the internet for its existence, or that depends upon particular software/hardware combinations (punchards, 8-inch floppy disks, etc.) that are no longer in use.
The fate of any tech-dependent art work is ultimately one of staying live or vanishing all together.
Bruce Posner's Introduction to Unseen Cinema can be read on-line. Posner argues against the European-art centric model for the appearance of an art-as-cinema, presenting his Unseen Cinema programs as the proof for the argument he makes in this article.
